Biology blurs line between sexes, behaviors

#PANSEXUALITY #ANDROGENY #BISEXUALITY #HERMAPHRODISM

by University of Rochester Medical Center

AUGUST 10, 2020

Credit: University of Rochester Medical Center

Biological sex is typically understood in binary terms: male and female. However, there are many examples of animals that are able to modify sex-typical biological and behavioral features and even change sex. A new study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, identifies a genetic switch in brain cells that can toggle between sex-specific states when necessary, findings that question the idea of sex as a fixed property.
The research—led by Douglas Portman, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Rochester Department of Biomedical Genetics and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience—was conducted in C. elegans, a microscopic roundworm that has been used in labs for decades to understand the nervous system. Many of the discoveries made using C. elegans apply throughout the animal kingdom and this research has led to a broader understanding of human biology. C. elegans is the only animal whose nervous system has been completely mapped, providing a wiring diagram—or connectome—that is helping researchers understand how brain circuits integrate information, make decisions, and control behavior.

There are two sexes of C. elegans, males and hermaphrodites. Though the hermaphrodites are able to self-fertilize, they are also mating partners for males, and are considered to be modified females. A single gene, TRA-1, determines the sex of these roundworms. If a developing worm has two X chromosomes, this gene is activated and the worm will develop into a female. If there is only one X chromosome, TRA-1 is inactivated, causing the worm to become a male.

The new study shows that the TRA-1 gene doesn't go completely silent in males, as had been previously thought. Instead, it can go into action when circumstances compel males to act more like females. Typically, C. elegans males prefer searching for mates over eating, in part because they can't smell food as well as females do. But if a male goes too long without eating, it will dial up its ability to detect food and acts more like a female. The new research shows that TRA-1 is necessary for this switch, and without it hungry males can't enhance their sense of smell and stay locked in the default, food-insensitive mate-searching mode. TRA-1 does the same job in juvenile males—it activates efficient food detection in males that are too young to search for mates.

"These findings indicate that, at the molecular level, sex isn't binary or static, but rather dynamic and flexible," said Portman. "The new results suggest that aspects of the male nervous system might transiently take on a female 'state,' allowing male behavior to be flexible according to internal and external conditions."

A separate study appearing Current Biology by a team of collaborating researchers at Columbia University further describes the complex molecular mechanism by which TRA-1 is controlled by sex chromosomes and other cues.

Explore further 

Biological sex tweaks nervous system networks, plays role in shaping behavior

More information: Hannah N. Lawson et al, Dynamic, Non-binary Specification of Sexual State in the C. elegans Nervous System, Current Biology (2020).

DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.007

Journal information: Current Biology

Provided by University of Rochester Medical Center

The Left Hand of Darkness - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by U.S. writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published ... Le Guin used the term Ekumen for her fictional alliance of worlds, a term coined by her father, who derived it ... The protagonist of the novel, the envoy Genly Ai, is on a planet called Winter ("Gethen" in the language of its own ...

[Guest] 5 Science Fiction Novels that Center on Bisexuality ...

girlsincapes.com › 2016/08/17 › diversereads-sffbisexuality

Aug 17, 2016 - The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K Le Guin US paperback cover 2000 Genly Ai is a human envoy from the Ekumen, an 83-world collective that's ... Genly is sent to Winter, where the inhabitants can choose to alter their ...

Gender and glaciers: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of ...

https://www.tor.com › 2009/06/08 › the-poetry-of-anthropology-ursula-le-...

Jun 8, 2009 - I love the world, I love Karhide at least, the country and the people and how ... She's also written the story “The Winter King” where she uses “she” as ... well to communicate the androgynous/bi-gender (bisexual?) nature of the ...

World Reduction in Le Guin - Verso

 

Fredric Jameson on Ursula K. Le Guin's method of radical abstraction and simplification.

https://www.versobooks.com › blogs › 3588-world-reduction-in-le-guin

Jan 25, 2018 - Huddled forms wrapped in furs, packed snow and sweaty faces, ... Such is our entry into the other world of The Left Hand of Darkness ... is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex than in any bisexual society I know of.

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin ...

https://www.adventureswithwords.com › 2013/12 › review-the-left-hand-o...

Dec 13, 2013 - Mr Ai has been sent to observe the inhabitants of the snow-bound planet of Winter. ... Le Guin wants us to think about our own world view and whether we ... so the notion of hetero-, homo- or bisexuality becomes null and void.

Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin's Critique of ...

https://www.jstor.org › stable

by M FAYAD - ‎1997 - ‎Cited by 31 - ‎Related articles

ditism but spiritual bisexuality," while "androgyny" is used by Sandra. Gilbert and ... inner world of Gethen, of Winter, as the Investigators call it. It is not a "dark.

The Undermining of Feminine Roles in Le Guin's Genderless ...

https://gradesfixer.com › Essay Samples › Literature › Science Fiction

Apr 30, 2018 - The novel takes place in Karhide, where winter is the nation's only season ... Although Le Guin sought to create a genderless world, she still created ... “Even in a bisexual society the politician is very often something less than ...

Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists

Oct

16

2024

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From Scientific American

Original title: Book Review: Fifty years later, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novel about Utopian Anarchists Is as Relevant as Ever

In The Dispossessed, a physicist is caught between societies

FICTION

The Dispossessed: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition)
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Harper, 2024 ($35)

A little more than halfway through The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s inexhaustibly rich and wise science-fiction novel about a physicist caught between societies, the protagonist, Shevek, born and raised in an anarchist’s collective, gets drunk (for the first time) at a fancy soiree in a capitalist society on a planet not his own. There this brilliant but bewildered scientist gets cornered by a plutocrat with impertinent questions. What is the point of Shevek’s efforts to create a General Temporal Theory reconciling “aspects or processes of time”?

Shevek explains that time in our perceptions is like an arrow, moving in one direction only. In the cosmos and the atom, however, it moves in circles and cycles, the “infinite repetition” an “atemporal process.”

“But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’” the plutocrat asks, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications?”

The tensions Le Guin explores here—between the theoretical and the applicable, the scientist and society—have not diminished in the 50 years since The Dispossessed swept the Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards. The science in this 1974 novel—now reissued with a celebratory, pained-about-the-present introduction by literary writer Karen Joy Fowler—is vague, a physics explored through metaphor. But Le Guin’s depiction of a scientist caught between opposing, utterly convincing worlds remains thrilling in its precision, at times even frightening.

On the collectivist planet Anarres, a desert landscape ravaged by famine, Shevek’s search for a General Temporal Theory is thwarted by scientist-bureaucrats who are concerned his discoveries might prove counterrevolutionary. After engineering a diplomatic escape to lush Urras, funded by capitalist plenty, Shevek learns that his work is viewed as proprietary—a product. This perspective changes him. Shevek finds himself behaving like the patriarchal “propertarians” of Urras. Drunk and lonely, this gentle man whose language has no possessive pronouns seizes a woman as if she is his. It’s an act that later disgusts him—and sets him on a revolutionary course that will affect all the worlds that humanity has reached.

Le Guin, who died in 2018, leaves it to readers to make what they will of this shift. The arrow of time has sped forward since 1974, but the circles and cycles of Le Guin’s masterpiece continue to suggest, with urgent humanity, both present and future.

HERSTORY MONTH

Beyond Gender? Imagining Utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness MA Thesis

Yin-Yang Dualism in Gethenian Biology and Politics in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
Philology, Culture and Education, 2018


Artea Panajotovic


Ursula K. Le Guin’s relationship with Daoism is one of the most widely known, but at the same time least researched, aspects of her work. In her SF classic The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin takes dualism as her central theme, and the view of dualism expressed here is firmly grounded in Daoist philosophy and its theory of the dynamics of yin and yang. In order to shed light on this influence, the paper analyzes two aspects of dualism in the novel: the specific physiology of the people and the political balance of power on planet Gethen. The dynamic androgyny of the Gethenian race is examined as a fictional transposition of the mixing of yin and yang characteristic of Daoist internal alchemy. At the level of society, duality finds expression in the organization of and interaction patterns between Karhide and Orgoreyn, two Gethenian countries founded on the principle of yin and yang respectively. The analysis of biological and socio-political dynamics on Gethen thus provides an insight into the specificities of Le Guin’s understanding of duality and reveals its deep Daoist roots.

Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Philology, Culture and Education


Towards a genderless society: Androgyny in late 20th century

Jane Allcroft

This dissertation will look at the concept of androgyny and the form this takes in contemporary novels, focusing on four different works of fiction taken from the late 1960s to early 2000s. A brief overview of the development of the idea of androgyny within literary texts from early creation mythology, through Plato to the fiction of the modernists provides contextual background to understanding current representations. Concepts of androgyny within contemporaneous literary and social theory will also contextualise the fictional representations, looking at how they both draw on and reflect theoretical concepts and social discourses.
Androgyny will be shown to be an archetype which takes on various forms depending on the social circumstances in which it emerges. The forms in which androgyny is manifested in the four novels under consideration here will be seen to range from the embodiment of both maleness and femaleness in futuristic androgynous humans in Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the earliest novel analysed here, through to poststructuralist genderless and intersexed narrators in the two later novels, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002). The dissertation will look at how this is achieved within the novels through a consideration of plot, narrative and textual analysis.
Concepts of androgyny will be shown to be bound up with destabilizing the categorization of people via gender and sexuality in its ultimate aim to become obsolete as a referent in a post-gender society. Androgyny’s ability to bring this about can be seen to lie in its fluid and multidimensional nature.

Family Frontiers: The Space Age Fiction of Marge Piercy and Ursula K. LeGuin
https://www.academia.edu/9687360/Family_Frontiers_The_Space_Age_Fiction_of_Marge_Piercy_and_Ursula_K._LeGuin

Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, 2014
Sue Dib Norton
Issue: 277
More Info: Issue No. 277

Why Healthy Forests Mean Fewer Pandemics

in Environmental Protection — by Reynard Loki — 17/09/2023

As scientists continue to research the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, one fact has become clear: Deforestation is linked to emerging diseases. When humans destroy forests to create land for human use, whether it’s for farming, mining, logging, infrastructure development, or urban expansion, biodiversity is diminished. And as some species go extinct, the ones that remain and even flourish in degraded forest ecosystems—like bats, rats, and birds—are those that are more likely to be hosts for deadly viruses that can jump to humans.

COVID-19, SARS, and Ebola—three infectious diseases that spread across national borders since 2002—share one thing in common: They were transmitted to humans from wild animals living in tropical forests, which are losing more than 100 trees per second due to rampant, unsustainable deforestation. It is also important to note that cutting down trees negatively impacts not only biodiversity and human health but the climate: Deforestation is responsible for 30 percent of global carbon emissions.

Human Activity Creating Reservoirs of Zoonotic Disease

Researchers in England examined over 6,800 ecological communities across six continents and found trends connecting disease outbreaks to regions where biodiversity has been diminished due to human activity. Their study, published in the journal Nature in August 2020, concluded that “global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.”

Some scientists had been sounding this alarm for many years, but it had fallen on deaf ears. “We’ve been warning about this for decades,” said Kate Jones, an ecologist at University College London who was one of the study’s authors. “Nobody paid any attention.”

Calls to Maintain Healthy Forests

Now is the time for governments to pay attention to the science: To prevent the next pandemic, efforts must be made to rein in rampant deforestation. In an essay published in the journal Science in July 2020, a group of scientists made the case that reducing both deforestation and the wildlife trade would result in a lower risk of future pandemics. “The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events,” they write.

Epidemiologist Ibrahima Socé Fall, who heads emergency operations at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, echoes that call. “Sustainable development is crucial,” he said. “If we continue to have this level of deforestation, disorganized mining, and unplanned development, we are going to have more outbreaks.”

Sustainable Development Means Sustainable Livelihoods

Investing in sustainable solutions also means investing in sustainable livelihoods. And so part of reducing deforestation is understanding the needs of rural communities living in or alongside forests, including providing economic incentives to protect the natural ecosystems around them. Giving Indigenous groups legal rights to their land is one way. In 2009 in India’s Narmada District, for example, villagers were able to secure legal rights to their land and resources, which led to more sustainable land management.

“Being secure in the knowledge that they own their land has meant that these communities have an incentive to protect and improve it for the future,” writes Edward Davey, the international engagement director of the Food and Land Use Coalition, an initiative to improve the world’s food and land use systems. “Villagers can now invest in actions like leveling, terracing, and irrigating farmland for greater productivity. Some villages are also taking steps to prevent illegal forest clearing and forest fires, by patrolling the forest and brokering community agreements to manage fire.”

In addition, research indicates that improving rural healthcare can lead to a reduction in illegal logging. In one study conducted by researchers from the United States and Indonesia, villagers in rural Borneo were given discounts on health clinic visits, which offset the medical costs that were often paid for by illegal logging. “The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages,” write the study authors. “Results suggest that this community-derived solution simultaneously improved health care access for local and indigenous communities and sustainably conserved carbon stocks in a protected tropical forest.”

Advocacy Groups Call for Action

In early 2021, several environmental groups and advocacy organizations co-sponsored a public petition—signed by more than 87,000 people as of July 2023—urging the Biden administration and Congress to curb deforestation in an effort to lower the risk of the next pandemic. Specifically, the petition calls for $2.5 billion in the next COVID relief bill to “support healthcare and jobs training for indigenous people in every tropical rainforest community, and support impoverished nations to build the healthcare systems to stop outbreaks before they spread.”

The petition’s sponsors, which include Brazilian Rainforest Trust, Endangered Species Coalition, and Mighty Earth, argue that “[e]nding deforestation is our best chance to conserve wildlife, one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to curb global warming, and absolutely crucial to prevent the next deadly, global pandemic.”

“We are all interconnected,” famed primatologist Jane Goodall told PBS NewsHour. “And if we don’t get that lesson from this pandemic, then maybe we never will.”

Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory, where he is the environment and animal rights editor. He is also a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food, and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health and Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Asia Times, Pressenza, and EcoWatch, among others. He volunteers with New York City Pigeon Rescue Central.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Ursulakleguin.com

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